Nvidia unveils the Blackwell Ultra AI chip, which boosts reasoning and action capabilities for AI beyond chatbots with 10-second DeepSeek query times.
Demand for AI chips has surged in the wake of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, fueling a massive surge in Nvidia share prices. Its chips fuel the data centers that power popular, power-hungry AI and cloud-powered services from companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google.
But the arrival of Chinese tech startup DeepSeek – whose R1 model sent shockwaves through Wall Street for its reasoning capabilities and supposedly low cost – sparked speculation that expensive hardware may not be necessary to run high-performing AI models. Nvidia, however, appears to be skirting such concerns, as evidenced by its January quarter earnings in which it breezed past Wall Street’s expectations.
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Nvidia wants its chips to be central to the types of reasoning models that the Chinese tech startup helped popularize. It claims a DeepSeek R1 query that would have taken a minute and a half to answer on Nvidia’s previous-generation Hopper chip would only take 10 seconds with Blackwell Ultra.
Cisco, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Supermicro are among the companies working on new servers based on Blackwell Ultra. The first products with Blackwell Ultra are expected to arrive in the second half of 2025.
Being able to reason, or think through an answer before responding, will allow AI apps and agents to handle more complex and specific types of questions, experts say. Instead of just spitting out an answer, a chatbot with reasoning abilities could dissect a question and provide multiple, specific responses accounting for different scenarios. Nvidia cited an example of using a reasoning model to help create a seating arrangement for a wedding that takes into account preferences such as where to sit parents and in-laws and ensuring the bride is seated on the left.
“The models are now starting to mimic a little bit of human-like behavior,” said Arun Chandrasekaran, an analyst covering artificial intelligence for market research firm Gartner.
And it’s not just DeepSeek and OpenAI creating models that can reason. Google also updated its Gemini models with more reasoning capabilities late last year, and Anthropic introduced a hybrid reasoning model called Claude 3.7 Sonnet in February.
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Some experts also believe reasoning models could pave the way for “AI agents,” or AI assistants that can take actions rather than just answering questions. Companies like Google, Amazon and Qualcomm have been vocal about their visions for AI-powered helpers that can do things like book a vacation for you based on your preferences rather than just churning out answers to questions about flights and destinations.
“What agentic AI excels at is multitasks,” said Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management. “And being able to reason in each of those tasks is going to make the agents more capable.”
